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Higher education (HE) has become a common pathway into game development careers. Previous research with students and educators has shown how game development HE exemplifies a "creative industries" approach that seemingly marries technical and creative skills, professionalism and passion, and individualistic entrepreneurism and interdisciplinary collaboration. However, little research has considered the varied institutional contexts such students and educators find themselves entrenched in. In this article, we argue that game development HE does not simply marry the technical and creative but is instead torn between different disciplinary cultures, ideologies, and aims. Drawing from data on 119 game development HE programs in Australia, we show that while game development HE is consistently positioned as a pathway toward student employability, just what skills and identities are emphasized as crucial for such employability varies pending on the program's institutional context—ultimately showing that combining creativity and technology is neither a straightforward nor neutral process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines level design processes and challenges at professional game studios. Thematic analysis of data, recorded through field studies and semi-structured interviews, identify four key themes: level design as an interdisciplinary effort; who is the level designer; the role of narrative in level design; and challenges of managing creativity in the level design process. Results indicate that while the role called level designer is often assigned to specific disciplines, the process of level design is usually highly interdisciplinary. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary collaboration requires management to maintain both creativity and efficient pipelines, by distributing ownership and facilitating communication and planning. The level design process seems particularly vulnerable to suboptimal interdisciplinary communication and planning, due to significant reliance on narrative design, game design, art, sound design, and tool development. While this article addresses level design specifically, most observations are comparable to previous findings on game development in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of technologies and digital platforms, contemporary game development firms' value propositions have become more complex. While on a global scale a considerable share of the game industry's revenue is captured by a few dozen firms, we are also witnessing the emergence of local and regional hotspots. In this context, legitimacy is of utmost importance if new competitive advantages are to become institutionalized as an industry. This paper extends studies which have offered temporal snapshots to the regional or local formation of game industry by focusing on the Finnish context. The concept of resilient values is introduced as legitimizing how the game industry is shaped and how the values are interpreted to develop the industry further. Our findings suggest legitimacy is intertwined with resilient values, thus resulting in the industry evolving over time through three different stages: (1) incubation period, (2) growth phase, and (3) institutionalized legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video games can be dynamic sovereign spaces for Indigenous representation and expression when the self-determination of Indigenous people is supported. Where games are concerned, self-determination involves the autonomy and right of Indigenous people to make key decisions regarding the process of how a game is developed as well as what that game entails. A game is sovereign when self-determination is a respected practice throughout all phases of development from conceptualization to distribution. In what ways can games be sovereign and what challenges may be faced? Utilizing comparative case studies of the self-determined games Lost Memories, Terra Nova, and When Rivers Were Trails, this research identifies possible approaches and challenges for sovereign games looking at development as well as the resulting designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing and contextualizing different aspects of the Finnish game development scene, this article provides concrete examples of why we need cultural studies of game development and how game development cultures can be studied. The article follows a three-layer approach, first exploring some of the historical and political developments that have shaped forms of local game production. Second, a focus is placed on working cultures within the industry and attitudes toward crunch time, work–life balance, and workplace regulation. Third, everyday strategies of organizing creative work are analyzed to better understand game studio cultures. The lessons from this empirical study directly contribute to the larger scholarly discussions around game production and creative labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the developers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter revealed that the stunning settings in the game were created using photogrammetry, a modeling technique up to then generally disregarded as being too cumbersome for the technical limitations of game engines. Shortly after, EA DICE announced that its 2015 flagship title Star Wars Battlefront would be adopting photogrammetry extensively not only to capture key props and costumes but also to recreate key locations beloved to Star Wars fans. Since then, the games industry has been flooded with articles, tutorials, and new software dedicated to the use of photogrammetry to create 3-D game assets. This article examines the key developments in the field since 2014, how the technique is being adopted by game studios, what are the current and future trends, and how the use of photogrammetry is likely to disrupt the well-established game development pipelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates a gap between popular narratives of game development in design texts and the reality of day-to-day development, drawing from an ethnographic account of intern developers to highlight the potential contributions of studio studies to Game Studies. It describes three takeaways. The first is that the difficulty developers have in articulating their work to others has implications for how we learn, teach, and talk about development, including how we share knowledge across domains. The second is that, at least for newer developers, negotiation with technology rather than mastery characterizes daily work, and the third is that problems frequently arise in articulating and aligning the normally black-boxed work of individual developers. Resolution of these issues commonly depends on "soft" social skills; yet external pressures on developers mean they tidy up and professionalize accounts of their daily practice, thus both social conflict and soft skills have a tendency to disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents results from a study of work practices in a Norwegian game development studio. Identifying key challenges faced by the company, the article argues that the combination of project management issues and a lack of human and financial resources led the company into an unfortunate situation where they were simultaneously working on two overlapping projects and thus were forced to cancel one of the projects. Further, the article also discusses how welfare measures related to cultural policy support system and work environment legislation may have impacted upon the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From gold farmers and ‘100 million brain-damaged online gamers’ to the world’s biggest game company and more players than US citizens, China seems like the cabinet of curiosities for the whole world of digital gaming. This article focuses on news coverage around Chinese gaming and presents three phases of such journalism. China’s emerging games market was most prominently featured between 1999 and 2005, while 2006-2011 focused on extreme play behavior in China. Most recently, a discourse of vast business opportunities and stabilizing markets has been presented by Western news media. In total more than 853 news articles are explored in parallel to the theoretical concept of Sinological-orientalism. This article suggests significant historical changes in the ways in which knowledge of Chinese gaming has been produced in English language news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role that game development tools have in the design and creation of video games. It does so through the lens of a series of patents by Nintendo that outlined the technological foundations for a truly (co)creative production platform for games. Game development tools shape and are shaped by the kinds of games they are used to produce as well as the underlying technologies of game consoles. The roles, sites, and means by which users are allowed to or encouraged to engage with (co)creative tools significantly impacts the kinds of interventions users may make. The article makes the argument that tools, like Mario Factory, form a technological foundation for (co)creation, participatory design, and convergence at a level that differs significantly from the current forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay makes the argument that the numerous ‘‘networks’’ or ‘‘inter/intranetworks’’ that structure the video game industry have lived local effects for those involved in the production of video games. In particular, this is most visible in the realm of console video game development but is visible in many other contexts as well. It uses the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) as an index into this complex and highly structured world that frequently disappears from developers perception. The essay uses largely historical data drawn from patent filings, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and court cases to analyze these networks. The essay argues that these inter/intranetworks, as constructed, have been instrumental in the way that the game industry now finds itself structured and that as the industry has ‘‘matured,’’ the networks have become less accessible and less interoperable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As games continue to displace television as a mainstream leisure activity, there has never been a better time to study games and to create solid connections between game developers and academic researchers. Building these connections will not be easy for there exists little common ground, and games are surrounded by supposition and saddled with the contradictory presumptions of harm and triviality. Despite these challenges, it is time to study games. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]